Jim Goad is Dead, Long Live Goad, by Adam Lehrer

The legendary transgressive writer died on June 22, read the essay to find out how (it's not what is being reported elsewhere)

Three weeks ago, one of Jim Goad’s ex-girlfriends informed me that the great right-wing writer had taken his own life at the end of June. Out of respect for his widow, I kept the news to myself. I can’t judge her desire for privacy, because God only knows the hell she is living through, but I disagreed wildly with the decision to prolong the concealment of his death from the public, as though Jim Goad were a piece of hazardous data that could be quietly scrubbed from the system. Goad was enormously influential in shaping the subculture that launched me, though he rarely received the credit he deserved for it. And if those of us he inspired aren’t permitted to know he is gone, we can’t properly mourn him, honor his work, or calculate the size of the crater he left behind. Over the weekend, I was finally given permission to write about his death.

I discovered Goad’s writing in high school. Coming from a family of liberal Jews, I found many of his themes and political inclinations shocking, to put it mildly. Around the same time, I discovered the literary demimonde surrounding Adam Parfrey and his Feral House imprint, along with much of the Gen X subcultural art and music that would utterly shape me as a thinker and artist: power-electronics groups like Whitehouse, cultural saboteurs like Boyd Rice, and terrifying writers like Peter Sotos all entered my adolescent database. My parents were thrilled that I read so much. Had they known what I was actually reading, there is little doubt they would have staged some kind of intervention. But of all these figures, Goad excited and challenged me most. Why? Because he alone removed the protective layer of irony separating his actual beliefs from his art. There was no disclaimer tucked inside the packaging. Goad meant it.

Much of Gen X art flirted with the symbols and aesthetics of the extreme right, but always from the safe vantage point of ironic distance. It was easy to admire that generation’s commitment to freedom of expression. Now, however, one suspects that such commitment was possible only because the prosperity of the 1990s provided a buffer between politics and art, one that has long since been vaporized. This is precisely why, as I’ve written before, so many Gen X edgelords rushed to clarify that their right-wing flirtations had been nothing more than aesthetic gestures once the cultural values of the 1990s melted away and were replaced by those of the 2010s.

The late Steve Albini devolved from one of underground American art’s wittiest provocateurs into an absolutely pathetic worm of a libtard, spending much of his final years on the app formerly known as Twitter melting down over the supposed rise of the far right while publicly flagellating himself for his post-ironic racism, or whatever the infraction happened to be that week. Likewise, following Parfrey’s death, his sister rebranded Feral House as a completely irrelevant publisher of radlib political theory. The Feral House of today bears roughly the same relationship to Parfrey’s Feral House that And Just Like That… bears to Sex and the City: Gen X liberals attempting to comprehend millennial politics while apologizing for the more libertine forms of freedom they celebrated in the 1990s. Goad, for all his faults, never submitted the necessary paperwork.

Goad never lost his edge precisely because he never wrote from a place of pure irony. His worldview was unmistakably right-wing, and he never apologized for it. That was why his writing shocked me so deeply. It was his truth, presented without protective packaging, and it compelled and changed me even as I resisted it through the liberal assumptions of my youth.

When I began rising as a literary figure in my own right, Goad and I had a couple of brief conversations over direct messages. In one, he antagonized me over my recent criticisms of his generation. He told me that ascribing cultural traits to an entire generation was “low IQ,” which I found completely ridiculous. How could millions of people who came of age under similar cultural, political, material, and technological conditions not share at least some observable characteristics?

I have often detected this tendency among Gen X figures. While boomers, millennials, and zoomers have been inundated with diagnoses of their respective generational maladies, and have even participated enthusiastically in diagnosing themselves, Gen Xers tend to deny that they possess any recognizable attributes whatsoever. Perhaps this is because they emerged during the decade when Western freedom reached its apex. Expressing one’s beliefs without fear of social or professional annihilation seemed so natural to them that they eventually lost the ability to examine themselves as a cohort.

But I ultimately concluded that Goad was, in fact, mourning the failures of his generation. He was disgusted by his contemporaries’ abandonment of their rebellious antagonism toward the prevailing social order. I know this because he wrote about it often. Here is what he had to say about Albini’s devolution into abject libtardism in a 2021 essay for Counter-Currents:

What’s semantically annoying about the term “edgelord” is that it implies insincerity. It also implies that the alleged edgelord cares about the feelings of the people who read or hear his opinions so much that he merely wants to offend them rather than express a heartfelt point. It suggests that they actually agree with the people they’re antagonizing and are simply misbehaving to be an “asshole,” which is a term Albini overuses to the point of self-parody. In this sense, it’s similar to the semantically-charged term “denier” — it’s a form of gaslighting that alleges you actually agree with the person about the Holocaust or climate change or vaccines but are denying it just to be a dick.

But I will always admire Goad precisely because he never wrote merely to provoke or shock, as Albini so often did. He wrote the truth of the world as he saw it. As far back as 1997, in his iconic book The Redneck Manifesto, Goad was already describing American liberalism as a system of profound cultural repression and hypocrisy. He argued that the liberal establishment used identity politics and cultural elitism to obscure its economic exploitation of ordinary working class white Americans. For Goad, the “redneck” was the designated scapegoat of an elite that denounced poor white people’s values as backward and toxic while ostentatiously professing its devotion to minorities, all to camouflage its extraction of wealth from the dirty hillbillies it despised. It is difficult to overstate how influential this critique would become. Nor is it surprising that Goad reemerged as an important political figure in 2016, amid the rise of the alt-right.

In 2017, Goad again proved prophetic with The New Church Ladies, which tracked liberalism’s evolution from a Western commitment to secular governance and freedom of expression into nothing less than a religion without God or faith. Goad distanced himself, however, from every ideology of control. He articulated a fundamentally American conservatism that celebrated the country as a society founded upon freedom of expression and rugged individualism.

Contrary to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s characterization of him, Goad was anything but a Nazi. He repeatedly dismissed the ultra-right’s compulsion to blame the Jews for everything as “low IQ” (undoubtedly, the insult was one of his favorites and he seemed to apply it to everyone he found objectionable.) More important, his conservatism was rooted in conserving the American dream. European fascism, he believed, was simply Marxism with racial consciousness substituted for class consciousness. His own consciousness was American and therefore contained pluralities, contradictions, and multitudes.

Before I had even begun to define my politics as right-wing, Goad showed me that an artistic worldview could be compatible with right-wing thought. Until then, I still believed that art was inherently leftist. Goad helped me understand American right-wing thought as a philosophy of freedom, including the freedom to create art without the censorious interference of some communist Big Brother. That was a freedom worth conserving.

It wasn’t only Goad’s politics that inspired me, however, but his approach to art and writing. For Goad, gonzo journalism was less a rigid journalistic form than an expressionistic art form in its own right. Hunter S. Thompson could certainly be understood as an artist, as could Ken Kesey, but Goad was unusually conscious of nonfiction writing as a form of creative production, one that permitted the writer to bend the rules of form and, of course, truth itself. The world always assumes new colors and shapes when filtered through an individual consciousness, and through Goad’s eyes, America acquired an unmistakably surreal and uncanny glow. In his writing, the country was beautiful and a fucking mess at the same time.

Goad’s iconic zine ANSWER Me! will always remain, for me, his monument and masterpiece, a hypnagogic synthesis of observational reportage and his singular expressionistic, hard-boiled literary style. He created a voice that simultaneously evoked Henry Miller’s surreal, diaristic musings; Robert Stone’s literary pulp; and the gonzo journalism and criticism of Lester Bangs, with perhaps a dose of Tom Wolfe thrown into the chemical bath.

In “The Orange County Vietnamese Gangs,” from the first issue of ANSWER Me!, Goad combined real-world crime reporting with the velocity and aggression of a pulp novel. By presenting urban horror through an uncompromising, unsanctified lens, he transcribed the stories of the inner city into compelling, transgressive narratives. In his writing, the Vietnamese gangs were terrifying, almost noble, and ultimately a bit ridiculous.

Another high point was his interview with the late pimp and memoirist Iceberg Slim, conducted shortly before Slim’s death. Slim’s 1967 memoir, Pimp, is shocking not only for its horrific depictions of misogynistic violence, but because it is a fucking literary masterpiece, one that, in a less ideological culture, would be celebrated as a contribution to the Black American literary canon every bit as important as Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo or Richard Wright’s Black Boy. Alongside Bangs’ iconic interviews with Lou Reed and David Sylvester’s conversations with Francis Bacon, I consider Goad’s interview with Slim one of the greatest art interviews ever published. But while Bangs sought to drag Reed’s rock-star mythos through the mud, and Sylvester sought to humanize Bacon’s genius, Goad did the opposite. Without denying that Slim was both a degenerate and a criminal, he reframed him as an artistic genius. Goad elevated a controversial figure of pulp literature into a high-art subject, challenging the boundaries of whom the mainstream considered worthy of serious literary journalism.

“[Slim] conjures up characters so real you can almost smell their intestines,” writes Goad. “As a writer he can be as eloquent as James Baldwin (but rougher,) and as lyrical as LeRoi Jones (but with more heart.)”

But the most disturbing article in any issue of ANSWER Me! also appeared in the third: “Killing Me Softly, Roughly, and Just About Every Other Fucking Way Imaginable: 100 Spectacular Suicides.” The article is exactly what it sounds like: 100 accounts of real-world suicides, recounted in painstaking detail and accompanied by horrifying images and farewell notes from the self-murdered. In one, a woman spurned by a former lover deliberately ingests metal objects until her internal organs hemorrhage. In another, a broke, aging porn star blows her brains out after agreeing to suck cock on camera one last time. Some of the suicides are famous, including that of the brilliant photographer Diane Arbus. Goad wrote that Arbus left a suicide note for her photography teacher, Lisette Model, in which she admitted that her goal in photographing society’s outcasts had been “photographing evil.” “She succeeded,” Goad wrote. “But evil swallowed her up as part of the deal.”

It should be said, however, that Goad’s taking of his own life, effectively making himself the 101st entry in “100 Spectacular Suicides,” represents no form of hypocrisy. He would never have been persuaded by Christian-conservative notions of suicide as a sin. On the contrary, he argued that the truly self-aware, the spiritually attuned, and even the brilliant were often those most susceptible to suicide. The worthless, he believed, were precisely the ones least likely to kill themselves:

That’s why we have room in our otherwise impregnable hearts for the individuals on this list…if there were more people like them, this world wouldn’t be half as bad. Ironically, it’s the nonsuicidal who make life unbearable.”

Still then, Goad’s death comes as a bit of a shock and is difficult to analytically reconcile. He had already survived so much: severe depression, seizures, several near-death experiences, and a fucking brain tumor. What possibly could have led him to make this decision now, after all that? Writing about his “brain invader” of a meningioma, non-cancerous brain tumor for The Observer in 2016, Goad wrote:

So I walk around like a suicide bomber strapped to the gills with explosives, always silently wondering if today will be the day. I am essentially in a lifelong fistfight with my own brain, never sure if or when it’s going to betray me. But that’s everyone’s struggle, as everyone’s body will eventually betray them—if they don’t get killed first.

A friend of the late writer told me that Goad had once weaponized her own experience with suicide against her. It was an obviously callous and cruel thing to do. Goad had a mean streak, and it would be a disservice to his memory to pretend otherwise. But she also told me that, near the end, he called her and admitted that he had been feeling suicidal himself. In recent years, Goad became petty and resentful in a manner that mystified many. He regularly contributed to online flame wars and relentlessly attacked other writers in what some reasoned was an attempt to cash in on the rise of Trump and the emergence of a countercultural right-wing media. I can only speculate, but I do believe he had some bitterness towards his omission from this particular canon and, like many his age, was having trouble adjusting to a digital reality.

So far, the only other obituary I have seen, written by Greg Johnson for Counter-Currents, omits Goad’s suicide and attributes his death instead to “long-term health problems.” I don’t know why a crucial part of the story was excluded, but it’s possible that Johnson doesn’t even know. Perhaps Goad’s widow simply did not want it made public. But I believe that concealing the truth would do the artist a disservice. The truth is that Goad took his own life. His health problems no doubt contributed to his suffering, but so, presumably, did an immense and finally unbearable psychic pain. According to my source, there’s no grand conspiracy to conceal his death, but she admitted that by vanquishing the suicide from the narrative, they’re certainly making it look like there is one.

That suicide remained such an open area of inquiry throughout Goad’s life forces us to confront the possibility that he was suffering all along. His writing, then, reads as a declaration of strength: a code of ethics by which to live and a survival strategy for inhabiting a world he knew to be cold and hateful. Suicide may always have remained the final option, but he fought damn hard to give himself reasons to keep breathing. I only hope he knew how much that code meant to the rest of us. I would even dare say that his writing helped other alienated and dejected young men find their own reasons to survive and endure.

Maybe Goad simply grew tired of wondering which day would be the last and decided to assign himself a definitive expiration date. Maybe in his suicide, he becomes like the enchantress Helen Vaughan from Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, revealing his true nature less as a flesh and blood man and more as an idea or, as Machen calls it, an “abyss of all being.” But I refuse to pity him because he would have hated me for it and condemned my sanctimonious appeals for empathy. Instead, I choose to honor the idiosyncrasy of his work and its enormous, largely unacknowledged influence on a subculture that would not escape the shackles of mainstream media until the internet revealed its anarchic potential across the forums and message boards of the 2000s. I honor Goad for being himself, for refusing conformity, for never surrendering, and for never fucking apologizing.